The discussions which I had with sundry individuals who were acquainted with the subject led me to study the Constitution with greater care and deeper interest than ever before. It seemed to me that we owed it to the memory of those venerated men whose names are conspicuous in the early history of our Republic--those men who so solemnly pledged “their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor” to the cause of freedom and the inalienable rights of man--to exonerate them, if we fairly could, from the awful responsibility that was laid upon them by those who insisted that they _guaranteed_ to the Southern States the unquestioned exercise of their assumed right to enforce the _enslavement_ of one sixth part of the population of the land, many of whom had shared with them in all the hardships and perils of their struggles for independence. It seemed to me that every article of the Constitution usually quoted as intended to favor the assumptions of slaveholders admitted of an opposite interpretation, and that we were bound by every honorable and humane consideration to prefer that interpretation. The conclusions to which I was brought on this subject I gave some time afterwards in the _Antislavery Magazine_ for 1836. But the publication of the “Madison Papers,” in which was given the minutes, debates, etc., of the convention which framed the Constitution, I confess, disconcerted me somewhat. I could not so easily maintain my ground in the discussions which afterwards agitated so seriously the Abolitionists themselves,--some maintaining that the Constitution was, and was intended to be, proslavery; others maintaining that it was antislavery. It seemed to me that it might be whichever the people pleased to make it. I rejoice, therefore, with joy unspeakable that the question is at length practically settled, though by the issue of our late awful war. THE CLERGY AND THE QUAKERS.